A substantial number of men, and some women, are using online profile photos of themselves posed with tigers to turn heads, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

The majority of photos show hopeful daters hugging or touching the tiger in photo ops staged at zoos or other wildlife centers overseas. The pictures are showing up on a number of dating sites including OkCupid, Hinge and Tinder, according to the report.

While there aren't any hard numbers available, some Tinder users told the Journal that as many as one in 10 profile pictures includes a tiger.

"A tiger has powerful symbolism," Catalina Toma, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and expert on the social effects of online communication, told USA TODAY Network. "It's a hunter. It's beautiful. It's exotic. I can see how men might want to be associated with that."

It's hard to draw any real conclusions without hard data or research on the tiger pictures, Toma said, but her past studies have shown that people use profile photos to convey messages.

"There's a lot of signaling that's happening," she said. The pose, location and subjects in the photos communicate aspects of the individual's personality such as interests and values, according to Toma.

"You're trying to capture an entire, three-dimensional person into a brief and technologically bound profile. All you have at your disposal is text and visual cues," she said.

And it's possible that tiger pictures do get results.

OkTrends, a research blog of OkCupid data, posted a study in 2010 that reviewed 7,000 profile photos. While it doesn't mention tigers specifically, the study did find that men who posted photos of themselves with animals got more messages from potential mates than those who didn't pose with an animal.